Bound What the Merge Gate Owes an Out-of-Diff Prose Finding and Record the Reviewer Footing

[ptr727]

Part of #1311, the Merge Gate half of #1314. With #1329's mechanical half this settles that issue, so the develop -> main promotion PR carries Closes #1314.

What changed

• pr-review-conduct Merge Gate item 2 records the reviewer footing: the coverage the gate requires is Copilot's, and CodeRabbit and Qodo are advisory, cited to the hub's docs/pr-reviewer-evaluation.md "Status" rather than restated as a roster. The issue's recommendation was advisory on prose paths only, and the recorded footing is advisory on every path, since that doc says no candidate is a required reviewer anywhere. Maintainer's call, flagged here rather than narrowed on my own.
• Merge Gate item 3 bounds what a finding on carried prose owes: a finding classed pre-existing under local-strict-review's classes, on text inside a canonical Markdown unit, is outcome 4 applied once per unit, gathered onto the unit's tracker on the hub, an open issue whose title carries the unit key, and answered with that link. Every other finding keeps its own outcome. The five outcomes stay the one enumeration.
• GOVERNANCE.md "Verification Discipline" binds the sibling sweep to a finding being fixed and to what the change touched or broke, filing a pre-existing sibling elsewhere rather than folding it in. This is the tiebreak the Rewrite Disposing of Findings by Deletion and Commit the Stop Rule #1330 body listed as open (its third bullet). agent-conduct surfaces the same bound.
• Skill mirrors regenerated. The ledger records each unit at the digest its last reviewer read.

Measurement, under the stop rule

introduced findings over total per read. Reads 1 to 3 are the two-round budget, read 4 the maintainer-granted round on 2930660, read 5 the one clause granted on 2f1aaa8.

Pass	Read 1	Read 2	Read 3	Read 4	Read 5
pr-review-conduct > Merge Gate	5/8	3/5	6/8	4/6	6/10
agent-conduct > When a Failure Surfaces a Lesson	0/3	0/3	0/1	unchanged	unchanged
GOVERNANCE.md > Verification Discipline	0/9	1/3	0/5	unchanged	unchanged
Diff pass	10/11	4/4	6/7	7/9	3/5

The two lightly edited units converged in one or two reads. The unit carrying the new rule did not. Each of the two granted rounds fixed the false claim it was granted for and drew a narrower one in its place: the first made an intent unit the carrier's own, the second files every intent-unit finding at the source, which a per-repo intent section such as Repository Layout does not have. That is the pilot's curve, and the next clause would draw the next one.

Open introduced findings, reported rather than fixed

These stand for the maintainer. My recommendation is to merge with them recorded on #1331 and let #1317's one-home pass, which this rule now plainly needs, settle the carrier routing in one place.

1. A per-repo intent section (GOVERNANCE.md Devcontainer and Repository Layout, a repo's own CODESTYLE.md additions, a "Disproved Claims" ledger) has no source defect, so "filed there too ... fixed at the source" files carrier-local noise on a hub tracker. The Verification Discipline qualifier it drops is "since every other carrier holds it too".
2. The carrier clause drops the pre-existing condition the hub-side rule carries, so read literally every carrier finding on an intent unit goes to the tracker, against the closing sentence.
3. The opener "turns on whether it is pre-existing" is falsified by the carrier clause, where fidelity decides.
4. "gathers onto" names no action, and a closed tracker for a defect the hub already fixed reads as "none is open", so a carrier on stale text files a new tracker for a settled defect.
5. The fidelity branch names no source for a unit's fidelity, spec/files.json, and covers verbatim and intent while the manifest also carries verbatim-tree, which is how this skill itself reaches a carrier.
6. The tracker retitle obligation sits only in this merge-time checklist, and a heading rename happens under skills that never route here. Copilot's open thread on the head asks the same.
7. A carrier's finding sits on a .github/skills/ path that no unit key names, so the text gives it no mirror-to-source mapping to find the unit or its tracker.
8. The "Markdown" qualifier excludes the non-Markdown units list names without saying why. Deliberate, the issue's own "correct for code".
9. The sweep bound is file-granular where the canonical pass reads by unit and backlog-burndown bounds a change to the units the issue names. The backlog-burndown half is P2 (decision): Decide backlog-burndown's Shape Before Its 23 Open Defects Are Worked One at a Time #1323's.
10. "and the finding is being fixed" means a finding deferred under outcome 4 owes no sibling sweep, so the class is lost on a deferral.
11. The local pass files a pre-existing finding "once" with no tracker, so the same defect gets an issue from the local pass and a tracker entry from a PR reviewer. A P1: Give Every Rule One Home, Replacing Restatements With Pointers or Generated Includes #1317 candidate.
12. A wrong pre-existing finding lands on the tracker unjudged. That is the issue's design, batch and move on, with judgment deferred to the tracker.
13. Every new sentence exceeds comment-and-doc-style's 25-word cap for new prose, an opt-in check the tree's existing prose predates.

Recorded as a coupling rather than a defect: item 2 hard-codes a reviewer footing the evaluation doc marks revisable, and its citation of a hub-only doc from a carried skill falls under no rule carried-doc-references states, which the diff pass flagged as uncovered rather than judged.

Pre-existing findings, filed

• Tracker: .agents/skills/pr-review-conduct/SKILL.md > Merge Gate, check this before merging or enabling auto-merge #1331, the Merge Gate unit's tracker, 9 items.
• Tracker: .agents/skills/agent-conduct/SKILL.md > When a Failure Surfaces a Lesson #1332, the agent-conduct unit's tracker, 4 items.
• Pre-existing defects in the five review-loop canonical units, found by the #1312 passes #1327 items 88 to 97 for "Verification Discipline", which P0: Triage the Open Backlog Into a Label Set, One Tracker Per Canonical Unit, and One Decision List #1315 will split into a per-unit tracker whose title carries the key.

Verification

Full local gate set per OPERATIONS.md "Local Verification", 1060 tests, all green. Three whole-unit passes and one diff pass, each read three times, recorded. Pre-push hook passed both checks.

Relates #1311, #1314, #1315, #1317, #1327.

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[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

The new Merge Gate batching paragraph misstates carrier ownership/routing for intent-fidelity units, which could cause real carrier-owned defects to be incorrectly declined and routed to the hub tracker.

Once you've addressed the issues Copilot identified, you can request another Copilot review.

Pull request overview

This PR refines the review-loop governance around (1) what the Merge Gate requires from automated reviewers, and (2) how “pre-existing” out-of-diff prose findings should be dispositioned (batching to a per-unit tracker rather than one-by-one), while updating the canonical review ledger and regenerating skill mirrors.

Changes:

• Updates pr-review-conduct Merge Gate item 2 to explicitly treat Copilot as the required coverage signal, with CodeRabbit/Qodo as advisory (per docs/pr-reviewer-evaluation.md).
• Bounds sibling-sweep expectations in GOVERNANCE.md “Verification Discipline” to the files the change touched (and to contradictions the change introduced).
• Records new canonical-review ledger entries and regenerates the distributed skill mirrors and digest stamps.

File summaries

File	Description
reports/canonical-review.json	Updates the canonical-review coverage ledger with new unit digests/stamps and adds the Merge Gate unit entry.
GOVERNANCE.md	Refines “fix the class” sweep guidance to be bounded to what the change touched/broke.
.agents/skills/pr-review-conduct/SKILL.md	Updates Merge Gate language for reviewer footing and adds batching rules for pre-existing prose findings.
.agents/skills/agent-conduct/SKILL.md	Mirrors the bounded sibling-sweep rule into agent-conduct guidance via a pointer to “Verification Discipline”.
.github/skills/pr-review-conduct/SKILL.md	Regenerated mirror of the pr-review-conduct skill for GitHub Copilot discovery.
.github/skills/agent-conduct/SKILL.md	Regenerated mirror of the agent-conduct skill for GitHub Copilot discovery.
.claude-plugin/fleet-skills/skills/pr-review-conduct/SKILL.md	Regenerated Claude plugin copy of pr-review-conduct.
.claude-plugin/fleet-skills/skills/agent-conduct/SKILL.md	Regenerated Claude plugin copy of agent-conduct.
.claude-plugin/fleet-skills/.source-digests/pr-review-conduct	Updates the plugin digest stamp for pr-review-conduct after regeneration.
.claude-plugin/fleet-skills/.source-digests/agent-conduct	Updates the plugin digest stamp for agent-conduct after regeneration.

Review details

• Files reviewed: 10/10 changed files
• Comments generated: 1
• Review effort level: Lite

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[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

The new Merge Gate batching text is ambiguous/partly self-conflicting about tracker lifecycle and how threadless (suppressed) findings are “answered,” and it needs clarification to be reliably followable across hub vs. carrier contexts.

Once you've addressed the issues Copilot identified, you can request another Copilot review.

Review details

• Files reviewed: 10/10 changed files
• Comments generated: 2
• Review effort level: Lite

[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

Newly added prose exceeds the repo’s 25-words-per-sentence cap for new agent-authored text and should be recast into shorter, clearer sentences.

Once you've addressed the issues Copilot identified, you can request another Copilot review.

Review details

Suppressed comments (1)

.agents/skills/pr-review-conduct/SKILL.md:65

• This newly added guidance contains multiple long sentences that exceed the 25-word cap, and it also mixes two routing criteria (class vs. fidelity) in a way that reads contradictory. Recast as short sentences and make the hub-vs-carrier routing rule explicit.

   What closing a finding owes turns on whether it is `pre-existing`. A finding on text inside a
   canonical Markdown unit, one the hub's `scripts/canonical_review.py list` names, classed
   `pre-existing` by the classes `local-strict-review` "Disposing of Findings" defines for a
   local pass, applied here to a PR-hosted finding, is outcome 4 of "Every finding ends in one
   of five outcomes" below applied once per unit rather than once per finding: the round gathers

• Files reviewed: 10/10 changed files
• Comments generated: 3
• Review effort level: Lite

[ptr727]

Answering the suppressed finding in Copilot's round 3 review on 2f1aaa8, Suppressed comments (1):

• .agents/skills/pr-review-conduct/SKILL.md:65, "multiple long sentences that exceed the 25-word cap, and it also mixes two routing criteria (class vs. fidelity) in a way that reads contradictory". Escalated to the maintainer. Both halves are already open in the PR body: the sentence cap is item 13, the same disposition as the three threads on it, and the class-versus-fidelity opener is item 3, one of the findings the last local read raised past the spent budget. Neither gets another edit here without the maintainer's answer, which is the stop rule's route rather than a verdict of no change needed.